It begins with the grunts and pants of an orgasmic sexual encounter, but it is hearts and souls that are really laid bare in Terrence McNally’s two-hander about an ex-con short-order cook, Johnny, and an emotionally scarred and buttoned-up waitress, Frankie.
They are two saggy, middle-aged, disappointed people who couple one night in a dingy New York apartment. Is it just another one-night stand going nowhere, or the start of something beautiful played out to the strains of Debussy and suffused in the light of a moon that filters through the apartment blinds?
What might have seemed full-frontal in 1987, at a time when the self-help industry was still in its infancy, now seems a little tame, contrived and overfamiliar. It’s a pity that McNally sets up the piece as an anti-romcom, but eventually settles for something more comfortable, conventional and trite. What I’d really like to see is Frankie and Johnny 20 years on.
It is very much a period piece and one whose sexual politics now look pretty old-fashioned. The tinge of fairytale mysticism is not heightened enough to sit comfortably within the meat-and-potatoes naturalistic format. The ordinary is never quite successfully transformed into the extraordinary.
The characters are stronger than the premise, and it takes a couple of really fine actors to sustain the show over its two-hour running time when they are the only people on stage. They have to put aside vanity and be really revealing about these two people who are not physically beautiful or the slightest bit pretty in their emotions.
Dervla Kirwan and Neil Stuke deliver. Stuke doesn’t shirk from making Johnny irritating and cocky, and Kirwan’s Frankie is funny and vulnerable as a woman who has built a protective wall around herself that Johnny is intent on dismantling, brick by brick.
• Until 6 December. Box office: 01243 781312. Venue: Minerva theatre, Chichester.
